New Deal Denialism

From the start of the current economic crisis, commentators have compared the ongoing unpleasantness to the crash of 1929, with the implication that we might soon begin to suffer a version of the Great Depression if we did not avoid the errors of our predecessors. Right-wing and libertarian pundits knew to a moral certainty what those mistakes were: neither Herbert Hoover nor Franklin Roosevelt had the wisdom to leave recovery to the energies of private enterprise. Few liberal or left commentators disputed the underlying point, conceding that though the New Deal brought the nation many fine reforms, it did not produce recovery from the slump—thus leaving the Right free to define the New Deal as a relic of America’s pre-Reagan dalliance with socialism, best forgotten. Yet the data support neither the Left’s concession nor the Right’s contention.